Bin there, dumped that: Waste-collection worker has can-do attitude about his labor

By: GARY WARTH - Staff Writer | Saturday, September 3, 2005 8:08 PM PDT ∞

Wrrrrrrrr ---- clunk. Bang! Bang! Bang! "I try not to make too much noise," Rudy Topete said with complete sincerity. The racket, however, is the cost of cleanliness, and the weekly annoyance passes quickly when handled by professionals like Topete.

"The trash business is a good job," said Topete, 43, a driver with Waste Management in Oceanside. "I like it. It is very close to my house. I do a lot of exercise every day, 10 hours of getting on and off the truck. The only hard days are when it's raining or really, really cold."

Whether living in a big city or small town, almost everybody in the nation relies on laborers like Topete to take away their garbage and trash, whether it's on a regular work day or a holiday like Monday, which celebrates working people. Most people, however, probably know little about the job itself.

The work is loud, dangerous, complicated, physically demanding and, according to Topete and other drivers, kind of a fun way to spend the day.

"It goes really, really fast," Topete said about the 10-hour day he works Monday through Friday. "Basically, you have to focus, and make sure you do everything safe. You're busy."

Working for a company with 51,000 employees nationwide also means more benefits than he was getting as the manager of a fast-food restaurant, which he was for eight years.

"The reason I left the restaurant business was I didn't have health insurance or benefits," said Topete, the father of two. "That's why I started looking for something else."

Topete is one of 69 drivers who work 61 routes in Oceanside and Camp Pendleton for Waste Management, the nation's largest solid-waste collector.

Most residential drivers work five days a week while commercial drivers work six days a week. Topete is an exception, driving a five-day commercial route to satisfy the city's growing cardboard-recycling program.

The metal bins that hold cardboard are cleaner and easier to roll than trash bins, which suits Topete just fine.

"The trash bins are really heavy, especially in restaurants," he said. "And greasy, too. And stinky. Especially in the harbor area."

Days begin early for trash collectors. Topete wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and is at work an hour later. His wife gets up at the same hour twice a week for her job, and Topete lives just 10 minutes from work, which makes the schedule more bearable.

"It was really hard at first," said Topete, who got to work at 8 a.m. at his previous job five years ago.

Topete has driven the same truck for two years and cares for it as if it were his own, personalizing it with religious stickers and an American flag in the cab. The green exterior is shiny and spotless, and except for the inevitable scars on the front-end forks that lift trash bins, it could have rolled off the assembly line last week.

"My truck is in very good shape," he said. Still, it is a big, lumbering machine and no match for faster, smaller cars driven by impatient drivers.

"You just got to watch it with the people driving fast, because you don't have a fast truck," he said.

Safety is a top priority on the job, stressed Dale Whitworth, a route manager with Waste Management.

"The biggest thing is, when the guys come in, we want them to go home (at the end of the day)," he said.

Safety training begins immediately after hiring and never really stops, with drivers getting alerts about incidents and precautionary notices weekly, he said.

Reminders of the job's dangers literally surround Topete. A sticker near the front of his truck depicts an image of a man severed by the truck's front arms, and a sign near the back gate reads "Extreme crush hazard."

As he drives his daily 60-plus-mile route, however, Topete makes it look easy. Traveling east on Mission Avenue, he pulled into a fast-food restaurant's parking lot, stopped near the bin, lowered the arms at the front of his trucks, slipped on his gloves and was out of the cab in about 30 seconds.

After rolling the bin out and aligning it with the truck's arms, Topete returned to the cab, where he used a joystick and the gas pedal to maneuver and raise the arms that lift the bin. The driver's-side mirror gives him an overhead view, and Topete can jerk the bin up and down like a salt shaker to help it empty.

A series of buttons on a console to his right move the arms and activate the compressor, which makes the "whirring" noise that comes from inside a trash truck.

With the bin empty, the arms lowered and the bin rolled back into place, Topete pulled out of the parking lot. Two minutes had elapsed.

The routine is repeated over and over, and at the end of the day Topete has emptied 150 bins outside of schools, restaurants, coffee shops, banks and shops. His truck is filled with about 5 1/2 tons of cardboard, and its contents are taken to a recycling plant.

Sometimes a bin can't hold all the cardboard a business uses in one week, and Topete finds discarded boxes on the ground nearby.

"It's no big deal," he said, picking up the boxes. "I try to make the customers happy."

While much of the day's routine never changes, Topete never knows what's around the corner. The next stop found a common obstacle, a car parked too close to the bin. Topete was able to squeeze the truck past, but set off the car's alarm because of the truck's vibrations.

"It happens a lot," Topete said over the squawking car.

Whitworth and Topete have been surprised by the trashed treasures they've found in bins.

"It's amazing what people throw away," said Topete, remembering when he collected trash for another company in San Clemente. "People up there, they throw away a lot of good stuff. Sofas, washers and dryers, TVs, pool tables. And sometimes they're in good shape."

Whitworth once found a stainless steel dialysis machine in a bin. Although the company has a policy against salvaging, he knew something was odd about the find, and he called the police. Sure enough, the machine had been stolen from a hospital.

About once a month, Topete said he finds a homeless person near one of the bins. Whitworth said he once was about to drive over a cardboard box in front of a bin. His assistant jumped out to move it and found a man sleeping inside.

Another day, Whitworth said, he dumped a full bin of garbage into his truck without realizing a man was sleeping inside. Fortunately, the bin was almost empty, so the trash did not have to be compacted. The man climbed up and onto the truck roof, where Whitworth spotted him.

Topete said he has found people sleeping in bins, especially during rainy weather.

"I open the bin to make sure it's cardboard and not trash, and on a couple of occasions there was somebody sleeping inside," Topete said. "If the person is behind the Dumpster, I say, 'Hey, don't bother to get up.' But when he's inside, I have to tell him, 'You know what, I'm sorry but I have to dump this, because if I don't, the customer is going to call.'"

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at gwarth@nctimes.com or (760) 740-5410.

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